Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

As we close out another successful year, we wanted to reflect on some of our achievements and our customers’ achievements throughout 2018 – a year that saw exciting new updates and implementations.

This year, we’ve brought a number of new customers onboard and worked on some ground-breaking projects with innovative brands, such as the AI wine chatbot that we launched for Lidl. The fully automated, AI-powered, Facebook Messenger chatbot is a virtual wine consultant, helping UK customers to easily select the best wine for their meal or moment. This brought to life the capabilities of AI powered customer service and demonstrated some of the exciting features that brands are now able to offer in order to create truly amazing customer experiences. It also saw Lidl UK win the esteemed prize of Best Consumer Chatbot at the CogX 2018 Awards.

Another customer making waves this year was Hoist Finance, who we were thrilled to see recognised as a silver winner in the ‘most effective implementation of technology’ category at the prestigious European Contact Centre and Customer Service Awards for its implementation of our cloud-based contact centre software, Aspect® Via™.

We were also delighted to see ourselves awarded at this year’s UK Cloud Awards, being named a winner in the Security Solution of the Year category, in recognition of the innovative nature and consistently excellent performance of our Aspect Verify® fraud detection software.

In addition, Ventana Research, the leading benchmark research and business technology advisory services firm, named us as a Value Index Leader in the first Ventana Research Value Index for Contact Centres in the Cloud.

Alongside these accolades, 2018 saw us appoint previous Aspect President, Chris Koziol, to President and CEO of the company. Chris has been a driving force behind our transformation from an exclusively premises software company to a provider of market-leading, cloud-based customer engagement solutions.

And speaking of our cloud offering, we also announced an update to our complete customer engagement platform in the cloud, Aspect Via 18.1® earlier this year. The latest release – which has been receiving great feedback – includes enhanced automated/self-service omni-channel continuity, greater enterprise integration, expanded APIs, greater data privacy, GDPR regulatory compliance features, and more.

Furthermore, we announced the integration of Aspect Workforce Management with Amazon Connect, giving users all the advantages of Aspect’s market leading workforce management solution including accurate labour forecasting, flexible staff scheduling, intra-day performance tracking and a wide range of insightful staffing reports.

It’s been a busy year and one that will be hard to top but we have some exciting updates for you all in 2019!

We look forward to continuing to work with all our amazing customers next year and to welcoming new customers too.